A mosquito pond in the making?

 

A year ago the view from my desk looked like this. Time passed, construction happened. Our balcony, unused, gathered dust through the summer as the contractors next door built a parking garage. A month ago, the construction stopped, and the work appeared done - nearly.

We're not sure why, but the builders have left a pond on the roof next door, complete with an archipelago of dirt islands. The water is at least an inch deep and when it rains we watch the waves ripple across the roof, and I wonder just how many gallons of water it might take to bring that ceiling down.

July, shortly

James keeps getting bigger and bigger. Here he is today, almost grown out of the blue sleeper that swallowed him when he came home three months ago.

The hole outside my window has also gotten bigger and bigger. We suspect they may be digging to China, or at least to the metro.

We celebrated Caroline's birthday (at the end of June) three times in July. As a result, Caroline became a candle blowing-out expert. She says she is a "big 5," now that she's hit 5.07 years old.

Baby life isn't all about crying and spitting up any more. See? J's on his baby playground here. Caroline likes to join him sometimes and pretend she's Gulliver.

Myself, I'm mostly found with a baby draped over one arm, phone in the other. I'm working full time from home and chasing after that elusive thing called sleep.

What are you up to, this side of July?

Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne would make mince meat out of these guys

We've entered a new phase of the project outside my window - an earth digging one. I've spent hours watching as the digger politely taps away at the hill and J snuffles on my shoulder. After a few days of this, Caroline and I dug out Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel so we could read about our favorite shovelers again (and marvel at how fast they dug that cellar).

C paid closer attention to the story this time than when she first met the book. When we finished she worried about Mike and Mary Anne, stuck in the cellar for all time. We talked about their friends visiting, and Mike getting out for a walk every now and then. All this talk of walks inspired me to start getting out of the house too, despite an incessantly crying baby and well-meaning ladies who think babies should stay inside until they start kindergarten. But that's a story for tomorrow.

"At least they didn't shoot out the window this time"*

Two in the morning, we woke up to our downstairs neighbors giggling in the hallway while they tried to fit key to door and stumble into their flat. I heard the clink clink of vodka glasses and then the loudest fellow, in a rush of enthusiasm, flung himself onto his balcony and started to bellow. No one answered, and after a few more romantically sobbing rants, he came inside, his friends settled him down and the party turned up its music as loud as it could go. Ukrainian turbo pop, meet the rest of the world. Do check out the purple pants suit in the sample below:



Glassy-eyed and on edge from an overdose of synthesized flute music set to an oompa beat, I woke at six and steeled myself for our neighborly construction workers to start their day. No sound came. An hour later, still no creak creak crashes. We opened the windows, checked again for their tell-tale beany hats and realized the date of today.

Ukrainian Pascha has just begun. The construction workers (almost all from the Ukraine) are on holiday. So are our neighbors. We figure we’re in for a weekend of late night celebrating, but if it means we can sleep late for three days, that’s one trade off I’m willing to take.

* Quote from Will, on the increasing regard for safety our neighbors display as they grow older.

Not exactly OSHA approved

Saturday morning, 7:30, crash, hallo!! Another crash, then a drill sounds vrrrzzz.

I pull a pillow over my head and sleep for thirty more minutes. It's just the neighbors, off their coffee break.


Like many buildings in our neighborhood, the house next door is under renovation. This one has stood almost empty since we moved here. I toured it three years ago, stepping carefully because the floors had rotted from a leaky roof and inattention. Only a caretaker still lived there, nearly always drunk, the ancient key keeper. Now he's gone, the building is sold and the new owner is remodeling from top to bottom. After six months of work, his crew has finished the roof. This quarter's project is the elevator.

Everything about this job is hand-labor oriented. The guys built the scaffolding in tinker toy fashion, and every now and then a pipe or one of the slats standing in as floor will fall to many curses from below. Each of those bricks you see here got lifted by pulley brick by brick (not crane or elevator, which is slightly unusual). Twenty-one days of pulley squeaks into the project, I have the feeling I've been helping too.

The workers are half old school and half new - you can tell by their outfits. The older guys wear one-color overalls and little hats that puff up at the top and don't fit over the crowns of their heads. The younger guys wear well-worn sports clothes and hiking boots. Mostly they don't wear hats, but when they do, they wear baseball caps with the brims pulled well down. There are no hard hats on site.

Even though the crew works seven days a week and starts each day at six in the morning, the pace of work is incredibly slow. The guys spend much of their time watching what is happening in our building, and if I so much as lift a blind three people will stop work to see what the stir is about. When I water our plants on the balcony the entire construction project stops. I feel like I'm a panda in the zoo, though I doubt the pandas comb their hair before they go on stage to eat their bamboo.

I watch them too though, and when I am resting and have run out of books to read, I count a wheelbarrow rising up, twisting and turning on the pulley, as high entertainment. Then the next brick goes past, some timber falls from the sky, hallos sound and life settles back to squeak squeak vrzzzz.